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Monday, November 29, 2010

It's a Good Thing Not ALL Dreams Come True!

Do you remember your dreams? I have remembered mine vividly since I was a very small child. And they have always been extremely bizarre. So much so, that I would not disclose the details of some of them to anyone I do not know well, for fear that they would think I should be institutionalized.

Take for example last night's slumberland escapades. I can't make sense of the first part but I think I had adopted a little boy with some sort of behavioural/developmental challenge and I had hired Sherma to help me take care of him. It was night time and I didn't want him to see me so he would go to sleep...there was also a huge, long slide involved, like a mega water slide.

Then Little A and I were at the Boulevard Club (where my bro and sister-in-law have a membership) along with my parents. The club had a pain management clinic and I was there for my sinus headaches. The place was full of all sorts of very rich, important people and I felt out of place. There was an old woman there (remember Charlotte's mother-in-law on Sex in the City when she was married to Trey?) with her grown son and she looked at my face and announced, "Disgusting"! I was mortified and terribly insulted. Then I was sitting with the whole family in the dining room of the club and my mom asked me to get snacks for everyone from the self-serve buffet table. I kept trying to fill little bowls with fruit, nuts, yogurt and granola, but each time I did, someone would take the bowl for themself or it would fall on the floor and make a huge mess. After an hour, I returned to the table and told everyone I could not get them snacks. At that point, I realized I had left Little A alone in a room (in my dream the club also had hotel rooms you could rent) for several hours and I became hysterical. Then my brother was there pushing her in a stroller and reassured me she was fine. We walked to a nearby dive/diner/bar where my sister-in-law had a part-time waitressing job (on top of her full time job of being an ob/gyn). I decided I had to get Little A home ASAP, so I started trying to hail a cab. A cab (that looked like a traditional British taxi) pulled over abruptly but then flipped over and burst into flame. The driver got out unhurt but then a fellow cab driver/bystander discovered the guy was hiding stollen jewellery in the trunk and I decided I didn't want to take a ride with either guy. So my mom and I found a rented car (somehow) and started driving. We eventually became lost and pulled over to ask an old bearded man to give us directions. He informed us that we had driven all the way to London, Ontario (several hours from Toronto), which was astonishing since we had only been in the car for 20 minutes. Then I woke up. As far as my dreams go, this is far from the weirdest. But it was, for some reason, somewhat disturbing and very intense and I woke up feeling kind of exhausted.

At school we have studied dream analysis from the perspective of several psychoanalytic theorists. I have to say, I do not really think there is a lot of significant latent meaning to dreams. Dreams are just the outcome of various neurological processes. Of course I have had weird coincidences where I dream of someone I haven't consciously thought about in a long time and then I see them or hear from them a few days later. But I think those are just coincidences. If the content of our dreams really does tell us something about who we are as a person, then I probably should be put in a straightjacket.